There's nothing to lose with Google Desktop Search

Companies used to pay vast sums of money for document archiving software for employees who needed to find files in a hurry.

Now such software is free to download from the web - and boy, do we need it.

With hard drives increasing in size to several hundred gigabytes, a vast amount of content can now be stored in digital format. You can find that content through interfaces like the Windows search function, but it's not very user-friendly.

We all know how to use a web browser and are comfortable doing so. It's no surprise, then, that the web browser has become the standard tool for exploring the bowels of your own computer as well as the internet.

Google's desktop search has been floating around for months in beta form but the final release was made available earlier this month.

It took a few minutes to install Desktop Search, but an afternoon of idle PC time to compile an index of my 40GB hard drive.

The results are impressive. Instead of scanning through folders or resorting to the search function embedded in Windows, everything is at my fingertips. Google Desktop will index Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and regular text documents, PDF files, music files, audio and video files. Pictures are displayed thumb-nail size.

Various plug-ins, some of them freely downloadable from the web, can be used to search other types of files. You can choose to display password-protected Office documents or keep them hidden.

Web searches through Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox web browsers will also be indexed as well as email messages from Netscape and Thunderbird.

Files held in Zip archives will not be displayed, which may be frustrating for those holding a lot of those types of archives.

Google Desktop will also display the results of recent web searches, but you can order it not to search specific websites by entering the web addresses in the software preferences.

AOL Instant Messaging conversation strings will also be saved and indexed, though not MSN Instant Messenger conversations. Clicking on the link of an AIM string will boot you into your messaging interface.

Each search result includes a short blurb, just as web searches through Google do.

What is most useful is being able to reference emails alongside Word or PDF documents that relate to those emails.

But Google Desktop is also good for organising the media files stored on your computer.

I typed in Audioslave and received a list of all the Audioslave tunes on my PC, the size of them, their compression rates, the song titles and the album artwork. By clicking on a link, Winamp starts and plays the song.

The Google Desktop search bar is embedded on your Windows task bar so you can kick-off a search without bringing up your web browser. You can set it to return 10 or up to 100 results per page and list them by date or relevance.

Free Desktop search engines are nothing new - there are several others available. Microsoft has a good one in MSN Desktop Search (toolbar.msn.com/), which slots into the MSN toolbar and will embed a quick search window in the Windows XP tool bar.

MSN Desktop Search will index a wide range of files as well as your contacts and messages in Outlook and Outlook Express.

Yahoo has its own respectable version (desktop.yahoo.com) which searches compressed files.

But what's useful about Google's Desktop Search is that you're quite likely to be using Google for your web searches anyway. Here, desktop search is seamlessly integrated into Google.

To go online just click the icon marked web and shift from making local to external searches. As you search the web, the software will also tell you if any matching files are held on your computer

Check out all these software packages to see which best suits you. They're all free and easy to install. You've nothing to lose.